Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov has unveiled his decentralized protocol’s “master plan” for 2026, shortly after revealing the US Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped its four-year investigation into the platform.
In a post to X on Tuesday, Kulechov said despite 2025 marking the most “successful year” for the platform to date, he still feels that Aave is on “day zero compared to what lies ahead.”
Pointing to 2026, the CEO outlined a master plan that places significant focus on scaling the DeFi platform and achieving specific usage metrics, such as $1 billion in real-world asset (RWA) deposits.
“As it stands, our strategy going into next year has three main pillars: Aave V4, Horizon, and Aave App,” he said.
Aave V4 is major upgrade touted to bring significant enhancements to the platform’s borrowing and lending pools, user interface and liquidation parameters, among other things.
In his post, Kulechov said V4 will be the “backbone of all finance,” as he pointed to the tailored lending markets that the V4’s Hub and Spoke model will provide.
Under this model, the hub refers to a single unified crosschain liquidity pool that functions as the central location for all assets on the protocol, while the spokes refer to highly customizable markets that tap into hub liquidity.
“This will allow Aave to handle trillions of dollars in assets, making it the go-to choice for any institution, fintech, or company looking to access Aave’s deep, reliable liquidity,” he said, adding:
“In 2026, Aave will be home to new markets, new assets, and new integrations that have never existed before in DeFi. We’ll continue engaging with fintechs and work closely with the DAO and our partners on the rollout to progressively scale TVL throughout the year.”
Looking at the next pillar in Horizon, Aave’s decentralized real-world asset market, the CEO outlined intentions to onboard “many top financial institutions” to become a central player in the RWA space.
“Horizon currently sits at $550M net deposits. In 2026 we’ll look to quickly scale this to $1 billion and beyond by expanding our work with leading institutional partners like Circle, Ripple, Franklin Templeton, VanEck, and others to bring major global asset classes to Aave,” he said.
The final pillar is Aave’s mobile app, which launched on the Apple store in mid-November, with Kulechov describing it as a “trojan horse” to bring DeFi to the mainstream.
The CEO said the mobile fintech sector is a “$2+ trillion dollar industry” that Aave wants to capitalize on by making its complex infrastructure as easy as possible for people to use, as well as beating competitors by offering better savings products.
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“Early next year, we’ll begin the full rollout of Aave App and start the journey to our first million users. This will directly fuel growth for Aave Protocol through an entirely new and untapped market. Aave cannot scale to trillions of dollars without mass adoption on the product level.”
SEC ends four-year investigation
On Tuesday, Kulechov confirmed the end of the SEC’s four-year SEC investigation into Aave, sharing a letter dated Aug. 12, 2025.
Kulechov said the platform is “glad to put this behind us as we enter a new era where developers can truly build the future of finance.”
Alongside the SEC and masterplan announcement, Kulechov capped things off on Tuesday by sharing that he had personally purchased $9.8 million worth of AAVE, outside of the Aave DAO’s proposed buyback program.
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